An Interesting Guitar Site

I received an email today from someone about my guitar blog and almost fell over dead. After all, my site is a backwater. Anyways, it was a cross linking email, and is something I’d normally ignore, however this site looked kind of interesting. What interested me about the site was:

– The site design is responsive (thus very modern)
– It had a great index to different techniques/topics
– It had chords for campfires

Although I’ll never spend the time to be able to play much on the guitar, www.hubguitar.com looks to be a pretty impressive web site offering. I’m looking forward to practicing some of the lessons he offers.

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Costing a FastLED Display Locally

Here’s an approximate cost breakdown if I were to head into some local electronics stores to purchase components for my portable displays:

Miscellaneous items include zip tie, solder, a few sizes of heat shrink tubing.

Then there’s my labour at a minimum of $40/hr and it takes about 45 minutes to build one.

Oh, did I mention all the time I spent learning/developing the coding and techniques?

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Learning the Guitar, Pt 4

I fell off the wagon for quite a while, but while I was on it, I quite liked spending time practicing the ‘fingerstyle’ method.

I’ve since found a site that offers 100 easy fingerstyle exercises at www.guitarnick.com, so I’m now focusing on these and have gotten back into it somewhat.

Once I’m more comfortable with fingerstyle, I hope to get back to my justinguitar and other material.

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Electronics Links

FSM

  • http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse370/99sp/sections/may18/slides/sld002.htm

 

Amplifiers

  • http://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/amplifier/amp_2.html
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    Good Links

  • http://tristesse.org/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards
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    Courses

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtXvUoPx4Qs&feature=youtu.be
    • http://scale.engin.brown.edu/classes/EN164S11/
    • http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs150/sp13/agenda/
    • http://www.newae.com/tiki-index.php?page=IntroToDigitalCircuits
    • http://engineering.purdue.edu/~ece437l
    • http://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen2350/AlteraSoftware/
    • http://mil.ufl.edu/3701/gcpu.html
    • http://engineering.purdue.edu/~ece437l
    • http://6004.mit.edu
    • http://www.cecs.csulb.edu/~rallison/pdf/

     

    Online Labs

    • http://teahlab.com
    • http://tams-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/applets/hades/webdemos/16-flipflops/10-srff/clocked-srff.html

     

    Cypress SoC Links

    I was given a Cypress PSoC 3 development kit. This includes an 8051 controller, programmable logic along with various analog components. The development software allows for visual design, lots of components in the libraries as well as programming in C. Oh, and I now have a PSoC 4 as well.

     

    TI MSP430

    I purchased this at the 2013 Vancouver Mini Maker Faire for $11.

     

    Bora Binary Explorer Links

    I purchased this board through the Kickstarter program. This board includes a Xilinx XC9572XL CPLD, which gives you equivalent to around 1600 gates.

     

    Altera FPGA Links

    I purchased an Altera DE1 development kit, which includes a Cyclone II FPGA. What an awesome looking board. 

     

    Altera De1

     

    Xilinx Links

    • http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10
    • http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_course

     

    Verilog Links

    • http://cjdrake.github.io/verilog-flip-flop-macros.html
    • http://www.ee.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Teach/Verilog/manual/index.html
    • http://vol.verilog.com/VOL/main.htm
    • http://www.asic-world.com/verilog/veritut.html
    • http://electrosofts.com/verilog/
    • http://sutherland-hdl.com/online_verilog_ref_guide/verilog_2001_ref_guide.pdf
    • http://www.verilogwiki.info/wiki/index.php/Tutorials
    • http://openhpsdr.org/wiki/index.php?title=Verilog

     

    VHDL Links

    • They would go here!

     

    CPU’s

     

    CPU Design

     

    Links Sites

    • http://homebrewcpu.com/links.htm
    • http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/CPU-Design-HOWTO.html#ss4.1

     

    Digital Simulators (see Altera for Modelsim)

     

    Analog Simulators

    • http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice 
    • http://www.new-wave-concepts.com/pr/livewire.html 

     

    Books

    • Digital Design And Computer Architecture
    • Digital Design Principles And Practices
    • Fundamentals of Logic Design
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    Learning the Guitar, Pt 3

    We’re into mid/late June and I can now play the basic ‘F’ chord pretty consistently and at a more reasonable speed. I took my Yamaha acoustic guitar into Long & McQuade and had them throw on a new set of strings and change the angle of the neck so that the strings are closer to the fretboard. Made it a lot easier to play.
    In the meantime, I’m experimenting with different ways to play the ‘A’ chord, so I’m not quite there yet on this chord. I really do have to wonder why Justinguitar used the A chord so early in his course. It’s not a real easy chord. Otherwise things are pretty reasonable with the basic 13 chords. As for strumming, I’m OK with basic strum patterns, simple up strum’s as well as some basic ties. Am trying to get that all in time with a metronome as well, so it’s a work in progress.

    My guitar teacher is trying to teach me the strum patterns for “Ho Hey” by the Lumineers, but I think that’s a bit advanced for me. I like to see a gradual build up of skill sets. Currently, my practice consists of:

    • Quick chord changes
    • Chord progressions
    • Chord progressions with strumming patterns
    • Fretboard exercises (up and down the fretboard)
    • Different finger picking patterns, with different chords

    I’m still really weak on recognizing the notes for the 5th and 6th strings and still pluck the wrong string quite a lot, but at least my confidence level with strumming and basic chord changes has increased significantly in the past few weeks.

    Oh, and for picks, I use very lightweight nylon picks when strumming and a slightly thicker pick when plucking notes. Of course, finger style is pick free.

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    Learning the Guitar, Pt 2

    We’re into June of 2014, and am still continuing with the exercises I’d outlined in part 1. My guitar instructor has encouraged me to focus on a song, although I’d really prefer to get chord changes and a few other techniques down a bit better first. So, while spend some time on that song, which is “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, I’m still doing my other exercises, primarily:

    • strumming patterns with different chord progressions
    • finger style exercises
    • fretboard exercises

    I haven’t really continued on with different scales or the 5th/6th strings lately. Neither am I learning additional chords. I have improved significantly on the F chord though.

    I think I’ll continue with these exercises, especially the strumming until I’m able to use different strum patterns with a song. Singing along with that will also add another level of complexity which I’m also working on.

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    Learning the Guitar, Pt 1

    At the young age of 59, I decided it’s about time I started to learn the guitar. I’ve owned a cheap Yamaha classical guitar since the 1970’s, but never got beyond page 18 of the Alfred’s beginner guitar course. After that, things got kind of complicated and I just gave up. This time, I thought I’d try a different approach and see what other learning methods are out there.
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